Article: Ever weaker; Germany's trade unions.(A new trade-union boss in Germany highlights the weakness of organised labour)

Peters in the pink

The decline of organised labour may not be entirely to Germany's advantage

IS THE chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, heading for a real bust-up with the trade unions, like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s? If you listen to Jurgen Peters, who has just been elected chairman of IG Metall, the engineering union that is the country's most powerful, you might think so. A punch-up with the government is "unavoidable", says Mr Peters, if it dared, for instance, to allow more local exceptions to industry-wide wage deals.

Yet such fighting words will probably not add up to anything more than the meagre protests earlier this ...

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